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I Punk’d Scott Walker

Journalists rarely invent the lie, though that does happen (see: Armstrong Williams, Stephen Glass, etc.), but often unwittingly pass it along. “There’s a whole industry, the public relations industry, that’s all about getting lies into the media—and they never reveal the hoax,” says the pseudonymous Andy Bichlbaum of America’s preeminent prank troupe the Yes Men. “They’ve sold wars (see Counterfeit Coverage), our deaths (tobacco), and now the death of the whole planet, starting with those who live in the poorest countries.”

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Countering lies sometimes requires more lies. In other words, putting truth into the mouths of liars. That’s the Yes Men’s M.O. Their entire shtick is about giving the marks a sporting chance—trawling reporters with over-the-top absurd fake websites and press conferences. (I stole from their playbook when I ran for Congress in 2011, and realized my Republican opponent had not registered her own .org. Bwahaha.)

I became aware of the Yes Men in 2004 when, on the 20th anniversary of the Bhopal disaster, Bichlbaum appeared on BBC World News posing as a Dow Chemical spokesperson to accept full responsibility for the tragic Indian gas leak that caused thousands of deaths and countless injuries. “Our shareholders may take a bit of a hit,” Birchlbaum told BBC after announcing $12 billion in victim compensation. “But I think if they’re anything like me they will be ecstatic to be part of such a historic occasion of doing right by those we have wronged.”

Since then, the Yes Men have pulled numerous successful media hoaxes to satirically poignant effect—Halliburton’s SurvivaBall to protect the on-the-go businessman from any post-apocalyptic hellscape, Dow’s “Acceptable Risk” death calculator and posing as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to announce the consortium’s noble 180 on climate change, to name just a few.

One of the Yes Men’s best coups was a two-pronged jape aimed at Shell Oil. I teamed up with them for this one. The first prong, a video of a launch party for a new Shell website—during which a miniature liquor-dispensing oil rig sprung an unstoppable leak—blew up the Internet. The second prong, the site itself, ArcticReady.com, offered an interactive function where users generated captions for images of pristine Arctic wilderness and wildlife, sharing them on social media. One example featured an Arctic fox that read: “YOU CAN’T RUN YOUR SUV ON ‘CUTE’. LET’S GO.”

The press initially reported both prongs as massive PR blunders. Business reporters were apoplectic. How could Shell be so dumb? As the man behind the official Twitter account for the fake Shell, I wrote tweets about being drunk and spilling coffee. By the time most journalists caught on, the “damage” was already done. We’d gotten our message across: Drilling for oil in the Arctic is inherently unsafe, a tragedy waiting to happen, not even factoring the release of heat-trapping carbon into Earth’s finite greenhouse. And we had gotten people talking about it in appropriately worried tones.

Birchlbaum once told me that the journalists they dupe usually don’t mind. I suspect that’s because pranksters can force journalists to cover stories they otherwise wouldn’t—or couldn’t—in their capacity as “respected” news people. But I’ve always thought of my pranks as a funny kind of undercover work.

James O’Keefe, the notorious fake pimp who killed the low-income advocacy and organizing group ACORN, doesn’t agree with me on that point. “There is a big difference between pranks and undercover investigative journalism,” he says. “I am and have never been interested in pranks for the sake of trickery or laughs. I am, however, committed to utilizing undercover investigative journalism to expose the truth and improve our society, the goal of most journalists, I believe.”

O’Keefe’s not a credible person. But I grudgingly respect him for his ability to get things done. Well, respect like I do Charles Manson. The undercover videos that led to ACORN’s downfall, wherein O’Keefe dressed as a—totally unfunny, apparently—pimp were deceptively edited, as is much of his work. He never talked to ACORN staffers dressed that way. And he ended having to pay $100,000 in damages to one ACORN worker for completely misrepresenting her as a pimp-loving criminal.

A little snip here, another there, and you can make an NPR executive call the Tea Party “xenophobic” just by leaving out the part where he attributed the description to Republicans he knew. That’s O’Keefe’s M.O. But I felt compelled to ask him some questions for this essay because that’s what I’m told journalists do. Sometimes undercover.

“Sometimes the only way to unearth dirty politicos’ fraud, and more, is to go incognito. This is a tradition with a long history that brings to life very important issues within society,” O’Keefe argues. “Nellie Bly and her famous investigation into mental health is just one example of many famous undercover journalists.”

Undercover reporting aside, the “objective” press asks a guy over here, a guy over there, and they rarely tell the news consumer the factual truth. It’s an institutional sickness. It wasn’t too long ago that the New York Times asked its readers: “Should The Times Be a Truth Vigilante?” Of course it should! That that was a serious question from the “paper of record” goes a long way to understand the coming end of civilization. “Credible scientist A says, ‘Our species is in serious trouble,’ but guy with undisclosed ties to Exxon and the Heartland Institute says, ‘Dude, chillax.’” You decide.

That every malfeasant public figure or PR hack has a valid opinion deserving equal weight next to empirically rooted reality is the deadliest jape of our era—pulling our politics further into the corporate shadows and poisoning our planet beyond repair.

Will God save us, like he did Walker? After taking his “beating” by the press, one of his “toughest days,” he turned to his devotional calendar, according to his new book. That day’s title: “The Power of Humility, the Burden of Pride.” He looked up and said, “I hear you Lord.” Whether that’s honest delusion or just pandering, and whether he truly believes targeting unions is anything other than a way to break the Democratic money base, the governor’s definitely fooling—or trying to fool—someone. And they call me the jokester.

Ian Murphy is a professional weirdo whose work has appeared at AlterNet, Salon, Crooks & Liars, the Daily Beast, Free Inquiry and, most regularly, at the Progressive. Follow him on Twitter @Ian_Murphy.